The National Conservation Training Center Museum and Archives houses films, photos, and documents chronicling the rich heritage of wildlife conservation. A changing museum and state of the art research archive help the public, researchers and professional conservationists better understand the rich history of American wildlife conservation.

Conservationists in Action

The National Conservation Training Center invites prominent conservationists, writers, historians, scientists, filmmakers, and educators to discuss their work to a broad and interested public.

Linda Lear is an environmental historian and the author of two prize-winning biographies: Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (2009) and Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature (2007). Dr. Lear is a noted scholar on Rachel Carson, having written the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and edited an anthology of Carson's unpublished writing, Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson, in addition to her biography of Carson, which has been called definitive. Booklist said that her biography of Beatrix Potter was a “meticulously researched and brilliantly re-created life.”
Dr. Lear holds a Ph.D. in history from George Washington University. She has served as a Senior Smithsonian Research Associate, a Beinecke Fellow, Research Professor of Environmental History at George Washington University and Senior Research Scholar in History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and as a consultant to Public Broadcasting Service’s “American Experience.”. She is Senior Fellow of the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives at Connecticut College where she is a Trustee Emeritus.
The presentation is free and open to the public. No tickets or reservations are required. It is part of The Conservation Lecture Series held at the National Conservation Training Center. For more information please contact Mark Madison at (304) 876-7276 or mark_madison@fws.gov or visit http://nctc.fws.gov/history/publiclectures.html